Brown recluse spider extracted from woman's ear

For the life me, the picture looks like every brown spider I find in this house :slightly_frowning_face:

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It had something to tell her. Something important. Everyone, we must keep our ears open for what they have to say.

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That’s fascinating and thanks for the unsolicited lesson on arachnids, truly; but I guess what I was really marveling at was that the woman somehow managed to avoid disturbing the spider until she saw the doctor.

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Ah, but what she doesn’t know is that brown recluse spiders find cotton balls to be perfect nesting material!

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Related horrible story:

In the mid 80s my mom, an elementary school nurse, would work at a nearby hospital during the summer to help make ends meet. The hospital was small, only for children and adolescents with brain injuries. The case I remember most was a young girl who had been bitten at the nape of her neck by a brown recluse. The usual solution, mentioned above, of removing tissue around the bite to fully eliminate the necrotic venom was a non-starter due to proximity to important things. Poor girl was living on borrowed time as the venom slowly ate away at her brain stem.

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My brown recluse spider bite took 10 weeks to heal and left a crater in my ankle:

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This is a whole animated Laika film waiting to happen…

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He and his wife have had a baby since then, so I think he did okay. I wondered about the necrosis factor as well, but didn’t press him for details. I know he got it treated right away though, so that surely helped.

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Definitive intelligence is not yet available; but SIGINT reports increased meme chatter around the keyword "TYM-PANIC’; with an emphasis on bodyhorror humor.

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The one that got me was in my hiking sock.

It’s estimated that upwards of 80% of houses in the Midwest have at least a few brown recluses living in them.

Shake 'em out!

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Sooooo reminds me of this:

(sorry, that’s the only GIF I could find of this squicky moment)

Nope%20-%20Into%20the%20Sun

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No teensy-weensy little welcome mats on the old ear lobes, then? :slight_smile:

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All I can say is… Congratulations and wishing you all the best with your new arrival.

Apparently, it also left you a quarter for your troubles. How nice.

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I grew up in eastern Tennessee in the early-1970’s. At school, they taught us to step on our shoes, working from toe toward heel, before putting them on in the morning, because the recluses love hiding in humid, warm, confined spaces.

Further, our bus stop had a clutch of baby copperheads in the midst of hatching one morning…we had to put cinder blocks on the top of our trash can lids to keep black bears from pigging out…bobcats would occasionally scream under our bedroom window during the early a.m. hours…garden spiders were sometimes big enough to shoot with my brother’s Red Ryder…and we were chased off from trout fishing by a wild boar one fine summer morning.

My childhood was pretty cool…

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Ugh, that’s the stuff of nightmares. So glad we don’t have 'em out here.

But I did accidentally sit on a bark scorpion once. Felt a wiggling under my butt, and shifted to the other cheek, and that little guy shot out, well, like he had just been sat on by a giant mammal.

People are so scared of these things, but they usually just want to be left the heck alone.

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And don’t pay any attention to him when he tries to tell you that he needs you to suck the poison out.

You really cannot suck venom out.

(glad I only fell for that once…)

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Wonder if that means they’re related to Tooth Fairies, or if it’s just one of those cases of convergent evolution. I must be a little older than MrShiv, as when I was a tyke, the Brown Recluses would take a chunk of flesh and only leave a nickel.

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See no weevil…

Took me a very long time to get the keyword. :sweat_smile: